How I Escaped My Certain Fate (23 page)

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For all performances of ’90s Comedian, the music played in the venue before the show was Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue. The flamboyant composer Richard Thomas, of Jerry Springer: The Opera infamy, and the insolent comedian Simon Munnery, from Watford, got me to listen to this album in the mid-nineties, when they used it as walk-in music for our Dadaist Edinburgh Fringe cabaret show, Cluub Zarathustra. Richard would argue that anyone, from
anywhere
in the universe at any point in time, would find Kind of Blue beautiful, and tried to employ it as a yardstick of objective artistic values. Simon, on a more practical level, just used to keep playing it, The Clash’s ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ over and over again, late at night, when I tried to sleep on his filthy floor during a lengthy period of sporadic homelessness, until I accepted that all three were masterpieces just so as to stop his damned dancing.

The ’90s Comedian set culminated in a half-hour section which, on paper, seemed deliberately and unjustifiably shocking, but my aim, as explained in the previous chapter, was to offer this
material
up, not brayed at full volume as if it were intended to horrify, but calmly and quietly, without any apparent gloss, as if for your contemplative consideration. Thus, Kind of Blue’s narcoleptic calm seemed utterly appropriate, hopefully chilling the audience, rather than working them towards a frenzy. Also, the album has this air about it – sometimes it seems sinister, sometimes romantic,
sometimes
cold and deathly, other times warm and fuzzy – and you
realise Miles Davis and company somehow created this variable emotional space, ready to be shaped in infinite ways by the ear of the beholder.

I wanted the last half hour of ’90s Comedian to have the same kind of take-it-or-leave-it, unforced emptiness, so that what you chose to carry away from it – offence, comfort, shock, warmth, hate, love – was up to you. Don’t imagine for a moment here that I am arrogant enough to be making a case for ’90s Comedian being a masterpiece of the calibre of Kind of Blue. I am not. That is for others to say, such as the cyber-critic Steven Bennett, head honcho of the Chortle website and the Val Wilmer of the London open-mic circuit, who named it the greatest stand-up show of the noughties. But he is merely an expert.

Again, it was probably a reaction against aspects of the commercial staging of Jerry Springer: The Opera that lodged this take-it-or-
leaveit
approach in my subconscious. When Richard Thomas’s songs were arranged and underscored by professional, commercial
musicaltheatre
arrangers, hot from Mamma Mia! and such like, they
necessarily
made interpretive choices about the intent of the material,
scoring
a lyric that could have been taken as ironic, sincere, delusional or triumphant with a musical-theatre texture, such as kitsch strings or jolly staccato guitar. Kind of Blue allows and encourages you, in its glacial space, to decide for yourself how you are going to respond to it. For me, it was an antidote to the shouty certainties of musical
theatre
and mainstream stand-up, with its funny faces and jokes.

The Go Faster Stripe recording of the show had no money to clear existing music, but we needed something on the titles for the DVD. What you hear there is a recording of a little jam I’d done on bass and guitar, with Al ‘The Pub Landlord’ Murray on drums, in about 2001, when we were toying with reconvening my vain
sub-Dream
Syndicate guitar-drone band, which had played all of three gigs more than a decade previously. Jim Version, of the groups Delicate AWOL and Tells, dubbed it up with some spot effects on a desk at Moat Studios, Stockwell, where the free-jazz improviser Derek Bailey recorded and where various guileless Doctor Who audio dramas were produced. He and Al allowed us to use it as intro music on the DVD for no charge. The choice doesn’t mean anything. It was simply the cheapest music available.

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Most times I performed this show I would come out in the dark and, before speaking, draw a bouffon-style circle, as described in the previous chapter, around the stage in chalk, which I would then not refer to until much later in the show. Then I’d bring the lights up and try and launch into the show in an upbeat showbiz style entirely at odds with the borderline performance-art gesture we had just seen. The show transcribed here was recorded in a venue where the angles of the stage and the seats meant no one would have seen the circle if I’d drawn it at the beginning, so I had to wait and make a point of doing it in full view later on. Strangely, as I entered the more uncomfortable areas of the show I did feel safer for having the circle around me, and sometimes I would dare myself to step outside it at key moments, as if to test my invulnerability.

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This gets a laugh at the Cardiff taping. I’m not sure why. Maybe, as I said, it’s because it was an odd, Sunday Night at the London Palladium thing to say having just drawn a chalk circle in the dark. Or maybe it’s because this is a transcription of the second run at the recording, and the audience knew I’d already done the same set in the same venue once that day already.

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This is a terrible introduction to a show, but looking back on it, there’s a sort of point to it. Received wisdom says, ‘Open with your best line,’ but this waffle has the effect of putting the audience at their ease and saying that this isn’t going to be a laugh-a-second, or a confrontational, set. I wanted to relieve the punters of the
obligation
to laugh, I suppose, and hope that they’d laugh anyway. This tour was booked into some comedy clubs, some arts centres and some theatres, so you had to flag up that it was a long piece in case people were expecting a club-paced set, and I wanted to try and stake out the space as mine.

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In the vapour trail of the 7 July bus and Tube bombs simply
saying
‘7/7’, like the phrase ‘9/11’, had a chilling effect on a room, which created a real tension and focused the audience, especially off the back of the deliberately sloppy opening.
 

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This story is entirely true, except that the animal-noises section of the evening probably lasted about twenty minutes, not forty. I exaggerated for comic effect. Again, I am indebted to Australia’s Ned Kelly of comedy, Greg Fleet, here, with his brilliant ability to make up routines about the telling of routines, such as the
sharkdeath
routine mentioned earlier. But I’d also been listening to Lenny Bruce’s ‘The Palladium’, a twenty-minute bit in which he tells the same story three times to three different audiences under three different sets of circumstances with three different results. Bruce is, sadly, remembered only for his superficially shocking subjects, but his restless formal experimentation also prefigures every supposed advance we’ve made in stand-up since. 

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The catchphrase was ‘Moon on a stick!’ from the second, disappointing series of BBC2’s Fist of Fun, from 1996, nearly ten years earlier. In Fist of Fun, in which I was very much the Syd Little of the Lee and Herring double act, I was always described by Richard Herring as wanting the moon on a stick, a metaphor for having unreasonably high explanations and a phrase that is still often yelled at me out of passing cars to this day. In the last episode of the series I was given a huge moon on a stick by Herring, about fifty feet in diameter, which I denied ever having wanted.

Soon after this, This Morning’s Judy Finnigan, clearly grumpy at being forced to have us on her show, was obligated to introduce a clip of this sequence during a TV interview. With hollow and weary eyes, Finnigan turned to us, looking sickened and bored like a hot and bothered polar bear in a rundown Soviet zoo, and said, ‘It’s comedy about nothing really, isn’t it, your stuff?’ – a quote we
subsequently
and delightedly used on posters.

†
Being a sometimes beloved but essentially obscure cult figure has enough drawbacks to make me realise I would never be able to cope with actual fame. Even in 2005, there’d always be a tiny minority of an audience who were audibly thrilled to see me, and their
excitement
made the people who were in the room but didn’t know me at all feel resentful, as if they had been judged for not being up to speed. To this day, in a pub, for example, someone will very
occasionally
come out of a dark corner and ask me for my autograph. Then other people, usually men at the bar, become enraged
somehow
that they do not know who I am, and begin to say, ‘Are you famous then? Why haven’t I heard of you?’ in a threatening way, as if I have deliberately orchestrated the whole embarrassing
encounter
just to annoy them.